WarGames

My thoughts on Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning

At the conclusion of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), the seventh installment of the surprisingly durable film franchise inspired by the long-running 60s-era TV show, the seemingly indestructible super-agent Ethan Hunt was left in a heretofore unheard-of position of vulnerability that was not due exclusively to the fact that it was only the first half of a two-part narrative. While made with undeniable wit, style and energy and containing any number of expertly-staged action sequences, there was a sense throughout that the series was beginning to show its age and lacked the inspiration of past installments—although the train-based climax was a thrill to watch, you were constantly reminded of the equally exciting train-based finale that Brian De Palma put together for the conclusion of the first film in the series back in 1996. An even bigger hurdle emerged when it wound up hitting theaters a couple of weeks after Barbie and Oppenheimer hit multiplexes and wound up dominating the pop-culture conversation and leaving everything else in its combined wake. Although the franchise had overcome one previous hurdle when Mission: Impossible III (2006) came out during the period when star/producer Tom Cruise was turning off audiences due to his couch-hopping weirdness, this one seemed more serious—serious enough, in fact, to make it seem as if arguably the most consistently entertaining blockbuster series of recent years had finally begun to wear out its welcome.

Now comes Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning and, as the tweaked title suggests, it heavily leans into the concept that this will be the final installment of the franchise, at least in its current iteration. However, if this is the end, then Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie (who also did the three previous films) are clearly determined to go out with as many bangs as they are able to cram into its sprawling, nearly three-hour running time. While the result may not be as impressive as De Palma’s instant classic original or Brad Bird’s deliriously live-action cartoon entry Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011), it has been made with great skill and efficiency and takes advantage of the fact that most of the narrative was set up, sometimes clumsily, in the previous film so that once it finishes recapping the key elements for those who either didn’t see it or have not retained every single aspect with crystal clarity, it can get down to its real business, which is to place Tom Cruise in so many seemingly death-defying action sequences that the simple act of watching them will leave many moviegoers feeling exhausted afterwards.

To briefly sum up those events, an experimental A.I. program known as The Entity has become sentient and gone rogue, causing, among other things, a massive submarine disaster costing many lives. However, there is a two-piece key that, when put together with the program’s source code, can put whoever has them in control of the program’s source code, allowing them to either shut it down for good or weaponize its enormous powers for themselves. After acquiring one half of the key, Hunt (Cruise) is charged with finding the second half before it can fall into the wrong hands, utilizing the skills of longtime team members Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) as well as those of master thief Grace (Hayley Atwell). Complicating matters are another group of government agents led by Briggs (Shea Whigham), who are pursuing Hunt and his men under the mistaken impression that they have gone rogue. Really complicating matters is Gabriel (Esai Morales), an actual rogue element who, with the help of deadly aide Paris (Pom Klementieff), is determined to get the key and the power of the Entity for himself. At the end—Spoiler Alert!—Hunt is able to get both pieces of the key but the exact location of the source code is still a mystery.

When The Final Reckoning picks up, it is a couple of months later and the Entity has only grown more powerful, taking over computer systems around the world and inspiring a doomsday-like cult of followers who seem to eagerly anticipate its ultimate desire of driving mankind to the brink of world war. As it turns out, this is more than just a little personal for Hunt, who has been made aware of just how many of his actions over the course of his adventures—usually performed in the name of saving various friends and loved ones—have helped lead to the current conflict, which the Entity and Gabriel hope to use in order to goad him into actions that will finally trigger the nuclear holocaust that the Entity hopes to bring about as a way of resetting the world and to bring it into order. Therefore, when Hunt is finally brought before the President (Angela Bassett) and her advisers, he not only manages to convince them to trust him for one last world-saving mission on his terms but to give him carte blanche in terms of what he needs, including the use of an aircraft carrier. (I suspect that the parallels between this scene and the pitch meeting that Cruise and McQuarrie had with Paramount executives over this film are strikingly similar.)

Once all of this is out of the way, the film is more or less one non-stop action beat that covers so much of the world as Ethan pursues his goal of saving the world again that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that viewers are required to produce one of those REAL ID driver’s licenses in order to be able to purchase a ticket. The most notable of them involves Ethan’s attempt to board that aforementioned sunken submarine and retrieve the Entity source code—inevitably, it is resting tenuously upon an unstable ledge overlooking an abyss and virtually every movie he makes causes the craft (not to mention everything inside, including loads of torpedos) to shift about in ways that threaten to impede both his search and his means of escape. Towards the end, things get even loopier with a biplane chase between our hero and villain in which Ethan spends more time dangling from the sides of both his and Gabriel’s planes than in the seat.

From a technical standpoint, these scenes are impeccably staged and executed in order to maximize every imaginable thrill and even a few that go beyond that—even the most jaded film fans will sit there breathlessly as they watch one of the world’s biggest stars seemingly throwing himself with abandon into one dangerous-looking bit after another. What really makes these scenes work is the way that, unlike too many slam-bang action beats of late, the film is willing to acknowledge just how absurdly preposterous they are. Like such genre classics as Raiders of the Lost Ark and the best James Bond films, the film manages to pull off the tricky task of adding just enough humor to the action so that you don’t feel pummeled by all of the chaos but not so much that they teeter over into pure cartoonishness. That attitude extends to the efforts of Cruise himself, who goes through his increasingly lunatic exertions with a combination of straight-faced determination and dry humor that allows you to revel in the preposterousness instead of questioning the ability of a 62-year-old man—albeit one in better physical shape than most of us could plausibly claim—to survive even the mildest of scrapes that he finds himself in here. (That said, I admit that perhaps my favorite moment in the entire film is an early brawl between Ethan and a group of would-be torturers that finds a very clever and funny manner in which to present the unfolding chaos that I would not dream of revealing here.)

The action set-pieces are so well-done that they manage to at least temporarily obscure some of the wobblier aspects of this particular entry. Of course, some of the major problems with The Final Reckoning are the same ones that hindered the previous film, such as the fact that chief villain Gabriel, despite the best efforts of Morales, is easily the least interesting of the entire franchise and one whose ultimate motives are just not that compelling. As a way of acknowledging the possible end to the series, the film offers a number of callbacks and references to things from earlier installments and while a couple of these are undeniably clever (you’ll know which ones I am talking about), others feel more forced, such as a clumsy attempt to elevate the significance of Mission: Impossible III, the entry that, save for Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s turn as the bad guy, is usually dismissed as the least of the bunch. And while franchise vets like Rhames, Pegg and Atwell (who remains, with the exception of Vanessa Redgrave, the only one of Cruise’s female co-stars in the series to strike actual sparks with him in their scenes together), newcomers to the fold like Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham and Katy O’Brian (the scene-stealer from last year’s audacious Love Lies Bleeding) barely register in their buried appearances with only Severance co-star Tramell Tillman making a real impression as a submarine captain. There is also the inescapable feeling that this is yet another two-part extravaganza that might have been better off if it had been judiciously edited into a single feature and left some of the more ultimately extraneous moments aside.

And yet, when The Final Reckoning works—and it does more so than not—it proves to be the kind of breathlessly exciting experience that many summer tentpole films promise but few manage to accomplish. For those who have been fans since the 1996 original, it proves to be a fitting conclusion for a series that has managed to maintain a fairly high and consistent standard for nearly 30 years. At the same time, anyone who has somehow not seen any of them before will still more or less be able to appreciate it as a largely gripping and occasionally goofy example of state-of-the-art action filmmaking. Either way, when it is all over, it proves to be the rare contemporary blockbuster that actually leaves you actually wanting more.